Pipe Gilinski ᯅ

‘Founder mode’ and ‘Jazz mode’ are both fundamentally a mindset for ‘leadership’. The “no marching band” line was spot on, to me was like saying, no babysitting, no marching orders. Founder mode is awesome but still feels like you’re directing everyone. Jazz mode assumes the players are already at a high level (and know their instrument), so no one needs babysitting. Really loved it … I’ve heard I. Zhao mention Jazz before … in fact last week on the Notion Dev Platform launch was so wow I think he literally actually said “less jazz… more techno”. Oh well…

@pipegilinski @jack @brian_armstrong @ivanhzhao @NotionHQ Hadn’t thought of that angle, but you’re right. It’s a lot harder that playing in a marching band. It’s a lot smaller too.

🚨NEW Long Strange Trip episode just dropped: Ivan Zhao, CEO of Notion @jack gave us the circular org chart. @brian_armstrong gave us player-coach. @ivanhzhao just added Jazz Mode. @NotionHQ is one of the clearest examples of a great SaaS company making the successful leap into becoming an AI company. That transition is much harder than it looks. @ivanhzhao is the definition of a Refounder, and has rebuilt his company nearly three times. Anyone who is looking to move into this new era, the “jazz era” should listen to this one 👇 Notes from our chat: 1. The Next Evolution to companies is structured freedom You need operators who can improvise and contribute creatively without waiting for orders. Think jazz band over marching band. Leaders must build teams that riff off each other dynamically rather than blindly following a rigid sheet of music. 2. Build a barbell engineering team Pair hyper senior architectural minds with junior talent. Senior leaders provide the taste and direction that language models lack, while junior engineers manage fleets of coding agents to execute the vision. 3. The best companies reinvent themselves When a startup stalls, incremental pivots rarely save it. Sometimes you must cleanly sever the past and start fresh. True technological shifts shouldn't feel like feature updates; they should feel existential. Interacting with frontier models should command a complete re-evaluation of your company's purpose. If a founder hasn't built with AI to feel this paradigm shift firsthand, they cannot find a new path forward. 4. Why Wartime is More Fun Peacetime in SaaS was comfortable, but wartime is where companies actually feel alive. When survival is on the line, the stakes are higher, and a shared, urgent purpose amplifies meaning for everyone. 5. Hire people who can blur traditional roles The best Notion hires have always blurred lines: designers who code, PMs who ship, engineers with taste. Baseline capability is no longer the bottleneck. The premium is now on a candidate's energy, optimism, and fundamental taste across multiple areas. 6. Acqui-hire founders aggressively As companies scale, they naturally calcify and slow down. The antidote is systematically acquiring early-stage startups just for the founders. Ex-founders act as aggressive machinery, breaking old patterns and forcing the organization to regenerate. 7. Financials March, Product Strategy Jazzes You cannot build a rigid product roadmap anymore because the underlying technology shifts too rapidly. Financial planning is the only system that still requires predictability; product strategy must be entirely fluid and improvisational. 8. Make compensation radically more meritocratic The SaaS era of "peanut buttering" compensation across the entire team is over. Companies must transition to extreme meritocracies to reward top performers. 9. Don’t reinvent the wheel unless you must Notion tried to first principle their way into sales. Eventually, they realized that was just plain wrong. Founders waste years trying to creatively invent a new sales system when the classic playbook works best. 10. Decentralizing the CMO Traditional marketing departments move too slowly to keep up with modern shipping cadences. The solution for Notion was to rip the CMO org apart and embed storytelling directly next to the product team. Demand generation now strictly serves the sales function. Lots lots more on this one. Ivan, as stylish as ever, was a blast. Enjoyed this one a lot. (links below) 👇👇 00:00 Introduction 02:22 From Founder Mode to AI Org 11:00 Hiring for Taste and Agency 24:28 Refounding Notion in Kyoto 30:27 Craft Versus Commerce 32:26 When to Refound 34:07 GPT-4 Refounding Shock 45:35 Leadership and Founder Energy 53:17 Sales Culture and Closing Thoughts

@nivi @FounderApp Oh wow!

Follow @FounderApp.

La “fe inquebrantable” de Abelardo es TAN grande … que quedo por encima de la Libertad De Expresion de la señora periodista, y tambien por encima de su labor periodista, que hasta donde veo simplemente hizo preguntas u opino. Pero es TAN TAN grande que quedaron “ofendidos” al algunos

LA FE INQUEBRANTABLE DEL TIGRE Intentaron sembrar dudas sobre la conversión de Abelardo y presentar su fe como cálculo político. Lo hicieron porque saben que el voto creyente y el apoyo popular pueden darle la victoria en primera vuelta. @MoralesViviane #ElTigreGanaEnPrimera Mira la transmisión completa de nuestro #CívicosLive 👉🏻 youtube.com/live/pZZH-wURY…

@0xCharlota 💯that book looks so dope (feel i want to have all content inside my brain)

@pipegilinski tl;dr brand design is very cool job

OK I FINE I BOUGHT IT

Quick update: not dead. $FIG Q1 results: → 46% YoY revenue growth, accelerating for the 2nd straight quarter → Net Dollar Retention Rate increased to 139%, our highest rate in over two years → Raising 2026 revenue guidance for the year Design matters more than ever.

CLI, API, MCP, SDK — LFG! notion.dev

@ABDELAESPRIELLA QUE BASURA de comentario ... No sea tan habla mierdad .. A QUIEN ENGAÑA ??? .... entre a Semana y vea lo cochino que se volvio eso con la campaña de @PalomaValenciaL

Este discurso de Jaime Gilinski es un valioso manual sobre la vida: la familia, los desafíos del nuevo mundo, la visión, el liderazgo auténtico, el verdadero significado del éxito y aquello que realmente importa. Pero también es una lección magistral sobre los negocios, el emprendimiento, la disciplina, la toma de decisiones, la construcción de empresa y la capacidad de convertir las crisis en oportunidades. Es, en resumen, una reflexión profunda sobre el propósito, la responsabilidad y la manera correcta de construir legado. Todo el mundo debería ver este video. Es, simple y sencillamente, extraordinario. (A.D.L.E)🇨🇴🐅

@ABDELAESPRIELLA Naaaaa.... Que tal LA BASURA DE SEMANA como se volvio de Abelardista (amarillista) ??? QUE DESCARO .... Ahora resulto haciendole eco a Gilinski???? IGual que con Alex Saab despues tambien nos va decir que no lo conoce?

@PalomaValenciaL @Margaritarosadf Que buena respuesta Paloma. Muner inteligente que eres. Esa mucha aparte de drogarse como el hermano no se le conoce mas

. @Margaritarosadf , con la admiración que te mereces como actriz y como mujer que ha abierto puertas en el arte para otras colombianas, quisiera decirte que no hay una única manera de ser mujer ni de representar a las mujeres colombianas. Muchas mujeres son uribistas y otras muchas que no lo son se sienten representadas por mí y mis luchas por las madres cabeza de hogar o las trabajadoras informales. Buscar al hombre detrás de la mujer es además un reflejo machista y tú deberías saberlo.

Building Paper on html and css turned out to be the right bet, even though it takes us extra R&D time compared to a custom renderer. html is the language for visual communication with agents.

Le puso "OFF" el dia que perdio y murio politicamente en la Consulta. Que mas explicacion necesita eso. Pero vaya pregunteles como un Alejandro Gaviria pasa del ser petrista (o miembro de gabinete) a ser ferreo contradictory que donde tiene el SWTICH (y los valores) a ver que le dicen?

Vicky Dávila pasa, en un mes, de arengar en una tarima como candidata derrotada en una coalición a hacer entrevistas a candidatos presidenciales. Qué nivel de desfachatez ¿A qué hora le pone Off a su oficio de política y On a su tarea periodística? ¿Dónde tiene el interruptor?

@0xCharlota @figma And you told me you were only serious Mondays and Fridays … can you imagine if you make it full time? x.com/0xcharlota/sta…

my name 👀 and app 👀 on huge billboards 👀 in SF 👀

Glad to hear @stephenhaney @paper! You asked, "What type of tutorial would you like to see next?" This one: "Conductor for Claude → Output in Paper." It seems like a very robust setup. The post below from @ridd_design was really popular! He mentioned he might do a video. You could invite him for a demo—now that you have Harcourt and the Paper YouTube channel will be more active. 🙏

Hey! Join me in welcoming Harcourt Allen to the @paper education and community team! We'll be posting way more videos on our YouTube channel (linked in the replies) 🔥🔥🔥 What type of tutorials would you like to see next?

@lennysan @mschoening 🎯

My biggest takeaways from @mschoening: 1. Great products have one tiny core that is exceptionally good. iPhone is multitouch. GitHub is the pull request. Figma is real-time collaboration. Dropbox was a menu bar sync icon. Notion is blocks and slash commands. Max’s failed startup in 2014 spent years polishing the editing experience, and it never worked. Meanwhile, Notion's first editor was terrible. But it didn't matter because the core was right. The biggest pitfall is thinking "if I just add one more feature, it'll finally be great." That never works. 2. Taste is a virtual machine in your head that predicts how your target audience will react. To build taste, you need reps. For designers specifically, the ones with the highest taste both build side projects end-to-end and constantly tinker with new apps. They’re the annoying person suggesting the 49th new tool. But that exposure to other people’s ideas is critical. Surround yourself with tasteful things so you feel like what you’re making is lacking. 3. The first 10% of every project is now free. You can send ten agents to explore ten versions of an idea before committing to one. Exploration has become very cheap. But quality, reliability, and shipping great products hasn't. 4. Agency is becoming the real differentiator, not skills. When AI closes skill gaps, the people who thrive are the ones who treat the world around them as malleable, and change things. Max points to Notinos like @brian_lovin and @EricTLiu, who moved from PRDs to Figma to building prototypes in code—not because their role told them to but because they wanted to. 5. The goal isn't for designers to ship to production—it's for them to master the material they're designing with. Max doesn't care if designers write code that lands in production. He cares that they think in code, because this forces them to consider the medium. At Notion, chat-interface prototyping moved out of Figma into a small LLM-friendly playground, because "the static image of a chat is basically a dead fish." If your interface is an agent, you can't design it in Figma. 6. The amount of software is exploding. The quality isn’t. Max: “I don’t feel like the quality of software has increased all that much in the last 12 months. The amount of software has, but it’s very, very hard to find software that is reliable.” Even top labs’ own tools regress every two weeks and still can’t render a TUI at a reasonable frame rate. 7. Being first doesn’t matter—being right does. Bluetooth headphones were crappy until AirPods. The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player. Anthropic started after OpenAI with less funding and is now killing it. Durability matters most. Think about how you’d build IKEA, a generational company that doesn’t concern itself with what’s trending on Twitter. 8. The SaaSpocalypse is overstated—people don’t actually want to maintain their own software. Max tried rebuilding Notion in a weekend and concluded that most people don’t want that. “Software is like a garden. You need to tend to it. The thing you pay for in the as-a-service is the maintenance.” Anthropic, of all companies, runs on Slack. 9. Coding is becoming a primitive that diffuses into every role. Models are improving exponentially at coding but not meaningfully at writing or other domains. When labs claim progress elsewhere, “you just applied coding principles to this domain.” At Notion, HR is already automating work without bugging engineering. The next wave isn’t “AI comes for marketing”; it’s that coding capability shows up inside every function. 10. We already have universal basic income—it’s called knowledge work. Max means this both as a joke and somewhat seriously. If you really look at what we need to live and be content, it’s a lot less than what we have. We’ve built this hierarchy and all these jobs that are “absolutely necessary.” We’re so inventive at coming up with new reasons why we must be in the loop. Will it look the same with agents? Maybe not. But we’ll find new ways to insert ourselves into the conversation. Full conversation: youtube.com/watch?v=mCO-D3…

🍎 Today's lecture: Agent instructions and skills! Lean how to turn your repeated prompts into reusable skills, get consistent outputs, and make your Notion Agent feel tailored to you.

@diegoooool__ no metio ese gol .... pero se le sintio esa zurda tan de james

👀 James Rodríguez en su primera titularidad con #MinessotaUnited: • 63’ minutos • 6 remates • 49 de 58 pases acertados, 35 en campo rival • Tocó el balón 87 veces (muchísimas, muy participativo) • 5 recuperaciones (muchas, también)

@Jason I'm in

We started an AI founder twitter group... reply with "I'm in" if you're a founder and want to be added